Obama's poll numbers start to wilt

Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy and ability to control spending has caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest levels since he took office, according to a spate of recent polls, a sign of political weakness that comes just as he most needs leverage on Capitol Hill.

The good news for Obama is that his approval ratings — 57 percent in a Gallup tracking poll over the weekend — remain comfortably high by historical standards for presidents.

Story Continued Below

But the trend lines among a variety of polls over the past several days are unmistakable: Independents and even some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are becoming skeptical, and many people of all stripes are anxious about economic and fiscal trends.

Obama’s approval rating has dipped below 60 percent on other occasions, according to Gallup, but though those slumps lasted only a day, this one appears to be more persistent.

So is the intensity of partisan reaction to Obama, who ran on the promise of softening ideological divisions and unifying Americans. On Sunday, a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll found that 32 percent of Americans strongly approved of the president, while 32 percent strongly disapproved.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, said the Obama administration should look at the new results “as a warning sign” but added that the new numbers were “not an indication of a loss of fundamental political support.”

“The real driver is not the president’s personal popularity,” which remains robust, Kohut said, “but faith in him to deal with the nation’s No. 1 problem”: i.e. the economy.

This highlights how some of Obama’s political fortunes remain outside his control, dependent on employment figures which have continued to worsen even as the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on measures to stimulate the economy and bail out the financial services sector.

Surveys released last week by Pew, NBC News/Wall Street Journal and The New York Times/CBS News show a similar pattern. The Pew survey, for example, registered an 8-percentage-point drop in public approval for Obama’s handling of the economy — falling from 60 percent to 52 percent between mid-April and June. The percentage of Americans who disapprove jumped by 7 percentage points during the same period.

Though Democrats are still generally more supportive of the administration overall, the slide in the president’s economic numbers defied partisan boundaries. The Pew survey, for instance, showed support for Obama’s handling of the economy sliding 6 percentage points among Democrats and independents.

Other factors driving the numbers will figure importantly in the debate this summer and fall over how to overhaul the nation’s health care system — a popular goal but one that comes with a trillion-dollar price tag.

Analyzing her firm’s latest poll, Gallup’s Lydia Saad said it is “not clear what’s behind the decline” in the president’s numbers, but she pointed to growing concerns over the administration’s deficit spending as a likely cause.

In last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll, where the president’s approval stands at 63 percent, 60 percent said the Obama administration has not developed a “clear plan” for dealing with budget deficits. Additionally, 52 percent said the government should “not spend money to stimulate the economy and should focus instead on reducing the deficit.”